The Voynich Ninja

I made a video about our swallowtail merlons project: 



Thanks to Marco for helping with the script!

Congratulations

Excellent work

Very interesting. It brought a lot of information together. 

An additional aspect of the swallow-tailed merlons is their use in heraldic insignias, either on the walls of pictured castles, or simply as a line of division. Heraldry's all about taking names and addresses.

Great, painstaking work Koen et al. I know others have had some success with narrowing down zodiac figures to geographic locations, though I’ve not seen anything as systematic as this research. Did you see any possible correspondences?

Great vid as always! 

Please do not listen to the comment(s) from people speaking on behalf of English pronunciation, or worry you are saying something wrongly.. we have no idea ourselves! It tends to be people who haven't ventured very far past their garden gate that think otherwise.

(28-12-2024, 11:36 PM)Barbrey Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Great, painstaking work Koen et al. I know others have had some success with narrowing down zodiac figures to geographic locations, though I’ve not seen anything as systematic as this research. Did you see any possible correspondences?

Saying anything about that would be somewhat controversial and unsubstantiated right now. The location of the Zodiac figures' source probably depends on the elements you focus on. I do believe that it should be possible to pinpoint it, but more work needs to be done. 

Just as a quick reference, here is JKP's map of the Sagittarii he found relevant in 2015. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I'm sure it can be improved and expanded a lot. It also contains a number of examples I find irrelevant. But it kind of shows the tendency:

[attachment=9628]

I'd personally go a bit more west still, but it's all quite complicated.

(29-12-2024, 02:01 AM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Please do not listen to the comment(s) from people speaking on behalf of English pronunciation, or worry you are saying something wrongly.. we have no idea ourselves! It tends to be people who haven't ventured very far past their garden gate that think otherwise.

Well, sometimes those comments are interesting, and I want to know when I'm really mispronouncing regular English words. And other times they are amusing, like the guy who insisted that I should pronounce "Moskow" like the British do, which is apparently the only right way.

Thanks to you Koen for the video. It's great.
Who is interested in how to pronounce Moscow. Actually, it shouldn't even be mentioned.
The wall was planned under Vasily III in 1521 and built by Helena Glinskaya (mother of “Ivan the Terrible”). 1st stage completed in 1534, 2nd stage in 1538. (no dovetail battlements)
Before that, Moscow had no stone wall. It was a moat with an earth wall behind it with double rows of wooden palisades filled with tamped earth.
Just to show how much background work went into the video, just to say “Moscow doesn't belong”.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Quote:Well, sometimes those comments are interesting, and I want to know when I'm really mispronouncing regular English words. And other times they are amusing, like the guy who insisted that I should pronounce "Moskow" like the British do, which is apparently the only right way.

The internet word police.. it makes me laugh because "English" in the UK varies so wildly I'm not sure who decides what is "right". I grew up in the midlands and travelled north for Uni, a few years back I travelled back down for a football game and I had to ask my sister to translate my drinks order to the bartender because he couldn't understand me. Another guy at the bar was laughing.. which was embarrassing.. because I grew up in this place!.. all of 2hrs away from where I am now.   

Then you have the whole American thing.. words like (what I would say) "Aluminium" and Americans would say "Aluminum" (dropped i).. where originally British English was "Aluminum" and American was "Aluminium" which the British adopted.. then the Americans decided to go back to "Aluminum" which the British will laugh at and say is wrong.. when it was what we said to start with before American influence!

This is what I mean by "we don't even know ourselves".. our language is a massive hodgepodge of influences and I doubt we say anything "correctly" ourselves anymore. There's a classic "TV blooper" of a girl announcing the "Grand Prix" as "Grand Pricks" instead of "Grand Pree" which people found hilarious, but god knows how many words we have actually morphed like this over the years.

At a complete guess I think what may have happened is we took French "Moscou" which we would pronounce "Mosco" and switched out the "u" for "w", or something similar.

This always reminds me of the time I was on a train in Scotland. Overall I had no trouble understanding the people, but there was this man sitting next to me. And he kept talking and talking, and I just kept nodding. I understood not a single word from the whole monologue. Not one word. When he got off the train, a Scottish man who had been sitting nearby told me not to worry: "He's from ???, I don't understand him either". Unfortunately I forgot which location it was where people apparently spoke this wonderous form of English.


I just noticed this video has a harder time attracting an audience than my previous ones. The "click through rate" is lower, which means that people either don't like the thumbnail or the subject. I might try changing the thumbnail as an experiment.